Cray/Media: Steve Conway, 612-683-7133 or Mardi Larson, 612-683-3538 (Feb. 22-23) Cray/Financial: Brad Allen, 612-683-7395 Cray/Tokyo: Toshihiro Hongo, 011-81-3-3239-0713 CRAY RESEARCH UNVEILS POWERFUL CRAY T90 HIGH- END PRODUCT LINE --WORLD'S FIRST WIRELESS SUPERCOMPUTER SYSTEMS Industry-Leader Cites Three- to Five-Fold Price/Performance Boost, New Advanced Technologies, Eight Advance Orders TOKYO, February 22, 1995 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE:CYR) today launched the powerful new CRAY T90 series of large- scale supercomputer systems, the world's first wireless supercomputers. The new series succeeds the firm's flagship CRAY C90 product line aimed at the established high-end supercomputing sector, where Cray Research holds a two-thirds global marketshare, the company said. The CRAY T90 series, formerly code-named Triton, is available with one to 32 processors (CPUs) and provides up to 60 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) of peak computing power -- compared with the CRAY C90 series' maximum 16 processors and 16 peak gigaflops. The new series also features a three- to five-fold price/performance boost over the CRAY C90 line and an array of new advanced technologies, including innovative connectors that eliminate all internal wires -- the largest CRAY C90 system contains more than 36 miles of wires. Cray Research reported eight advance orders for the new systems, from two unnamed Japanese industrial firms; Chrysler Corporation; MCNC, parent corporation of the North Carolina Supercomputing Center; Los Alamos National Laboratory; and three additional undisclosed customers. Under an early-shipment program, a four-processor CRAY T90 system was installed at one of the undisclosed customer sites in December 1994 and completed acceptance testing with 100 percent hardware and software availability. "We have a strong prospect list and are confident the CRAY T90 series will maintain Cray Research's leadership in this important sector, by delivering unrivaled performance and superior value to current and new customers," said Cray Research president and chief operating officer Robert H. Ewald in Tokyo. Cray Research Japan chairman Yoshikazu Hori added, "We expect the CRAY T90 series to do well in the Japanese market, where Cray Research's business is strong and growing." Cray Research holds the number two position in the Japanese supercomputer market and to date has installed 100 of the company's systems here, with orders for more than a dozen additional systems for installation in 1995, he said. U.S. list pricing ranges from $2.5 million to $35 million for the new CRAY T90 series of parallel vector supercomputer systems, available in three chassis models: - The CRAY T94 model: 1-4 CPUs (1.8-7.2 billion calculations per second); 512-1024 million bytes (megabytes) of memory; air- or liquid-cooled. U.S. list pricing starts at $2.5 million for a one-processor system with 512 megabytes of memory. - The CRAY T916 model: 8-16 CPUs (15-30 billion calculations per second); 1024-4096 megabytes of memory; liquid-cooled. U.S. list pricing starts at $9.5 million for an 8-processor system with 1024 megabytes of memory. - The CRAY T932 model: 16-32 CPUs (30-60 billion calculations per second); 4096-8192 megabytes of memory; liquid-cooled. U.S. list pricing starts at $22 million for a 16- processor system with 4096 megabytes of memory and goes to $30 million for a 32-processor system with 4096 megabytes of memory, or $35 million for a 32-processor system fully configured with 8192 megabytes of memory. The company will ship some of the new systems before mid- 1995, according to Ewald. Volume shipments are slated to begin in mid-1995, with smaller CRAY T90 versions shipping first and systems of all sizes shipping by year-end 1995. In the past, Cray Research introduced the largest system in each new high-end supercomputer generation first and waited a year or more to ship smaller versions. "By also shipping small and midsized CRAY T90 systems at the start, we maximize their product lifetimes and increase our potential in the industrial sector, which favors small and midrange systems," Ewald said. Ewald said the high-end production supercomputing sector includes government, industrial and university customers who often support hundreds or thousands of users running tens or hundreds of third-party and proprietary applications. "For their production supercomputing needs, these customers typically require a robust 'plug-and-play' solution, not just a 'fast box.' Cray Research is best able to deliver this complete solution because of our performance leadership, proven technology, unrivaled customer and applications base, industry-leading UNICOS operating environment, high-end market experience and global marketing, sales, support and service networks," he said. "No other vendor can deliver this much value." "The CRAY T90 series provides our large customer base in the high-end sector with a fully compatible upgrade path that protects their software investments, while offering substantial performance and price-performance advances," said Ewald. CRAY T90 systems operate in either native CRAY T90 mode or CRAY C90-compatible mode, Ewald said. "Users may continue running their application binaries in CRAY C90 mode, exploiting the new system's higher performance without modifying their applications at all. To take advantage of the CRAY T90 architecture, an easy recompile into native CRAY T90 mode will yield even greater performance gains." The CRAY T90 series is initially available with Cray floating- point capability. The new supercomputer series will also be available with 64-bit IEEE floating-point capability next year, according to Ewald. Because of the new technologies and increased operating efficiencies, development costs for the CRAY T90 series were lower than for the preceding CRAY C90 product line, he said. "The new systems are also easier to manufacture and maintain, and we've boosted reliability and availability as well." Along with the wireless connectors -- called eZIF (electrically activated, zero-insertion-force) connectors -- other new technologies in the CRAY T90 systems include: - 50,000-gate ECD (Emitter-Collector-Dotted) logic chips designed in partnership with Motorola. The new chips provide a four-fold increase in logic density over the 10,000-gate chips used in the CRAY C90 series, while substantially reducing power requirements. - 52-layer printed circuit boards developed exclusively by Cray Research. Each board, smaller than a standard sheet of paper, can contain over one mile of interconnect circuitry. - Stacked memory devices (4-megabit BiCMOS SRAM memory) that eliminate the need for integrated circuit (IC) packaging. Ewald said that in 1994, Cray Research also became the revenue-leader for massively parallel processing (MPP) systems in the scientific-technical market. "Our CRAY T3D systems are already being used for production work, but because of the challenge of converting applications for use on MPP systems, parallel vector systems like the CRAY T90 series will continue to be the mainstays for most production supercomputing. The new CRAY T90 systems can be closely coupled with CRAY T3D systems for highly parallel applications." Cray Research has also had strong success in the market for lower-priced supercomputer systems with the company's CRAY EL90 and CRAY J90 product lines, he said. "We've captured more than 100 advance orders for our new CRAY J90 systems, which list for as little as $225,000 and begin shipping later this quarter. The CRAY J90 series has more capability than anything else in its price class, but midrange systems like this aren't designed to meet the demanding needs of the high-end sector. To quantify that, a 16-processor CRAY J90 system has 25.6 billion bytes per second (gigabytes) of memory bandwidth, more than 10 times that of competing systems in its class. A 32-processor CRAY T90 system has over 800 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth -- which means CRAY T90 systems can efficiently handle much larger problems and much larger computing workloads." "Over the next few years, Cray Research plans to develop a new, scalable 'guidepost architecture' for high-performance scientific-technical computing that combines the best of the three leading computer architectures on the market today -- parallel vector supercomputers, MPP systems and symmetric multiprocessing systems," Ewald said. "Our concept merges the advantages of all three architectures, with the applications needs of our customer base and the overall market in mind. We will provide a smooth migration path for Cray Research customers," he said. "The North Carolina Supercomputing Center (NCSC) used a current-generation Cray Research supercomputer and our own UAMGUIDES air-quality decision support software to help the state develop clean-air policies required by the 1990 Clean Air Act," said NCSC executive director Jeffrey Huskamp. "This pioneering approach substantially shortened the policymaking process and vastly improved its quality by allowing us to evaluate many scenarios quickly." NCSC plans to use the CRAY T90 system's increased power to evaluate the entire ecosystem, he said. "We can now move to the next level -- cross-media analysis covering air, surface water and groundwater. This will improve policymaking in all areas, including environmental health impacts and socioeconomic effects. Cray Research's leadership in environmental supercomputing makes them not just a technology supplier, but an important partner in our mission." "Chrysler Corporation has realized a substantial return-on- investment by utilizing Cray Research's most advanced supercomputer system in our vehicle design process," according to Choon T. Chon, executive engineer, Simulation and Computer Aided Engineering at Chrysler. "The timely simulation of future vehicles, and their manufacturing processes, is essential to guide the design to optimize product features, address safety and environmental issues, while reducing the design and development cycle time and cost. The new CRAY T90 system will enable our engineers to conduct additional, more complex simulations, with even greater performance and improved turnaround. We are confident that the high level of reliability and support that we have experienced in our long-term relationship with Cray Research will continue." CRAY T90 systems run Cray Research's industry-leading UNICOS operating system based on UNIX system V and support multiple ATM, FDDI and HIPPI connections. Disk drive support includes IPI drives. Support is also planned for SCSI and fiber channel disks offering a maximum of 64 trillion bytes (terabytes) of storage. Cray Research provides the leading supercomputing tools and services to help solve customers' most challenging problems. ### Editor's note: More detail on new advanced technologies in the CRAY T90 series follows. NEW ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES IN CRAY T90 SUPERCOMPUTER SYSTEMS NO INTERNAL WIRES. All internal wiring--more than 36 miles in a current- generation CRAY C916 system--is eliminated in the new CRAY T90 series by pioneering devices that connect the processor modules to memory. Each of these small "eZIF" (electrically activated zero-insertion-force) connectors has 400 signal contacts and replaces 800 interconnect wires (400 terminated lines). Modules can be installed or removed easily, by applying low voltage to operate the heat-controlled spring on each connector. The only wires remaining in the CRAY T90 series are for external I/O (input/output) connections. 50,000-GATE CHIPS WITH REDUCED POWER REQUIREMENTS. The CRAY T90 series uses new 50,000-gate ECD (Emitter- Collector-Dotted) logic chips designed in conjunction with Motorola, compared with 10,000-gate chips in the CRAY C90 series. The new chips provide a four-fold increase in logic density while significantly reducing power requirements. The new ECD chips do this with a programmable power feature: Critical paths within the chips are run at full power, while support signals are run at slower speeds requiring lower power. Each device supports "Boundary Scan" diagnostics that allow interconnection problems to be identified and resolved quickly. 52-LAYER PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARDS. Each of the five basic types of printed circuit board modules in CRAY T90-series systems (CPU, Memory, I/O, Boundary Scan Support, Share) is smaller than an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet of paper and can have an industry-leading 52 separate layers, compared with 22 layers in the CRAY C90 series. Over one mile of interconnect can be imbedded in each circuit board--actually three boards laminated together with a direct solder technique to reduce connections. The two outer boards are each 22 layers and carry signals, while the inner 8-layer board carries power and ground. Integrated circuits are mounted on both sides of the modules, producing circuit densities of over 800,000 gates within 2-nanoseconds' reach of each other. One third of the chip-to-chip interconnects are eliminated by mounting the silicon directly onto the PC module, which greatly improves system reliability. STACKED MEMORY DEVICES ELIMINATE IC PACKAGING. The CRAY T90 series uses 4-Mbit BiCMOS SRAM memory devices with a 15-nanosecond access time. For each memory module, 40 of these devices are stacked, eliminating the need for IC packaging. These innovative "memory stacks" are attached to the memory modules with a unique connector technology similar to the eZIF connectors described above. OPTICAL CLOCK DISTRIBUTION. The CRAY T90 series features an advanced optical clock system to distribute the phases of the 2-nanosecond clock reliably to all logic modules in the system. Cray Research, Inc. February 1995.